Category Archives: Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Endless ramblings regarding the every Tuesday & Thursday-morning bike ride, leaving Olive Hill & Canada Road at 7:45am, rain or shine

Getting back to the basics. Why We Ride.

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

It was an interesting morning. I dressed appropriately for the cooling temps lately, but still lamented that Summer is over and Winter is coming.

Just me and Kevin this morning, unfortunately the faster, younger Kevin. He pretty much stayed with me on the way up the hill, taking it easy and never out of breath. It was Thursday which meant up through the park, and that steep pitch in the middle hit me even harder than usual, making me wonder if it was going to be possible to do the full ride this morning. You wonder why you don’t turn back, several times up the hill, but you don’t want to look back at this day, this ride, this moment, as the time you look back to when you gave up and from then on, shortening the ride would become routine. Instead, I admit to thinking maybe we’d have to move the ride up and leave 10 minutes earlier. Or maybe at some point in time I could semi-retire and no longer work 6 full days a week at the bike shop, but instead show up a bit late now & then because the ride took a bit longer.

But eventually I did make it, like I always do, and Kevin asks if we need to shorten the ride, maybe do the upper-Tunitas loop instead. I wasn’t having that. I pushed on. Nicer up on top than Tuesday; no fog, no damp roads. Nice views too! My legs were still OK for the little bumps on Skyline, and maybe they’d be OK on West Old LaHonda too.

Some time back we decided that 8:43am was the bail-out time. If we arrived at Sky Londa later than 8:43, we’d need to abandon the West Old LaHonda section and head straight down. That was mainly an issue for rain, which slows things down a bit, especially the descents. But 8:43 is still what I keep in mind, and I told Kevin, as we approached the descent on Skyline into Sky Londa, that, while we were behind schedule, we could make it up on the descent! Yeah, right, a 6 minute descent that we’d have to do in 3 minutes to keep to schedule.

With no time to waste (being three minutes behind schedule) we headed west on 84, with a large propane truck a bit behind to keep the heat on. That actually worked pretty well; the guy seemed to be doing about 27mph, so we did have to put in some effort to stay ahead. And, of course, memories of the movie “Duel” came to mind.

West Old LaHonda was brutal. No legs, no lungs. No rabbits or turkeys either. Where are all the turkeys??? But the view of the coast, sans fog, made it worthwhile. It always does, at least for me. Kevin doesn’t understand my fascination with that stretch of road. He just wants it over and done with. I don’t get it; if I were as strong as Kevin, if I could handle it with such ease, I’d think it was fun!

Still riding, need to keep writing

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

It’s important to keep routines going when things come into your life you can’t control, like my wife’s cancer. The inability to control outcome is one thing; the process, yet another. It’s been determined that surgery to remove the one pretty small tumor in her lung makes sense, because there’s no evidence of the cancer anywhere else. But it’s been 5 days since we spoke with the Thoracic Surgeon and we still don’t have a date for the surgery or even the heart echo testing that needs to be done first. And every day that thing is still in there, is one more day it’s got to spread somewhere else. But wait, there’s more. Kaiser is set for a 3 day strike October 4th-6th, which is probably throwing a wrench into their scheduling. And my sense, is that Karen’s surgery is for something life-threatening and should be put ahead of most others. That’s a more self-centered, selfish way of looking at things than I am normally comfortable with. But that’s where we are, waiting.

Meantime, it’s good to be doing the full Tuesday/Thursday morning route, regardless of how slow I’ve been climbing Kings lately. Back in the day, we’d return from the ride somewhere between 9:18 and 9:22; these days a “good” ride has me back at the start by 9:30 and sometimes as late as 9:37. Once I get up on Skyline I’m ok, and by the time we get to West Old LaHonda, I can ride at a pace where it’s not completely obvious that others are having to wait for me.

They say that one of the signs of depression is not being able to look forward to fun things in the future. By that definition, I’m doing pretty well, because not only am I looking forward to going to France, again, for the Tour, but Facebook has been sending me all these cool posts from people doing the Stelvio in Italy, and that’s something I just have to work into my plans. And I’m looking forward to taking my wife on the cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore and have even planned a “perfect day” in Singapore, a day prior to embarking on the cruise.

If only we could speed up the process of getting that tumor removed from my wife’s lung. That will make everything seem better.